As #SpeakLoudly enjoys its second full week of activity at Twitter and the website has now been up for about a week, it might be time to address those nay-sayers who are claiming that #SpeakLoudly “jumped the gun” on the Laurie Halse Anderson title, Speak. What’s more, I would like to speak loudly about those people who have been most active within the campaign who were described today as “swanning about.” You see, I am the guy who created the hashtag on September 19th. Boy, just when you think you have begun to SpeakLoudly, you have only really just begun to. . .well. . .speak loudly. . .

I want to be respectful. I have friends who speak loudly much better than I, if better means to come out-gloves off-ready to spar. And I genuflect to the richness and depth of experience of those within the publishing industry who are fantastic resources and great friends of the YA community. I have friends who tell me that “the web will be what it wants to be.” On September 19th, I wanted to lend support to Laurie Halse Anderson’s book, Speak. I have been rooms where Laurie Halse Anderson has spoken and I have been inspired by her. I have worked with teachers who have shared with me the student responses to this title. After reading some of the postings of September 19th and the days that have followed, it is essential that we keep this book upon our radar. As the powers that be have not included this YA classic as part of the canon, I will speak loudly for it until it is. Laurie Halse Anderson is our modern day Judy Blume (it tickles me with Laurie goes fangirl as it affirms some of my own feelings for great authors). It is a privilege to include her books as part of my classroom library. It gives me a great thrill that Laurie commented upon a student project today at Facebook. It thrilled my students as well.

In the past two weeks, I have not only had an opportunity to interact with Laurie, but I also got to meet a fantastic up-and-coming YA author, Sarah Ockler. Watch Sarah’s video from that first week of #SpeakLoudly and you would get an immediate sense of what we are about with the speak loudly campaign. Add to this the wonderful teachers I have met who have shared their stories of powerful reads in their own learning communities and who have voiced their own frustrations and concerns when it comes to censorship.

I am thrilled that I see tweets going back and forth as more users are asking about the SpeakLoudly twibbons being used by almost 2000 people. What is frustrating to me this evening is to read a post that reduces the SpeakLoudly campaign to one book, one location. Let the web be what it will be, but since September 19th, we have had more people share from their personal experiences from reading Speak and finding the courage to tell their own stories than to allow nay-sayers to try and pin the campaign to a piece of cork board with a little label reading “didn’t go far.”

David Macinnis Gill and I have seen the positive track that this campaign is taking since the inauguration of the new site, SpeakLoudly.org. A number of visitors are coming to the site to read some of the archived blogs from the past two weeks and commenting upon them. On Sunday evening, we hosted Risha Mullins whose #SpeakLoudly-inspired blog was probably the most widely read post in the blogosphere for the first weekend in October. This hour-long conversation brought to the table a high profile case of censorship, authors, publishers, teachers, and readers. Yes. Twitter can do this when it gets “worked up.” The essential conversation that took place on October 3rd reminded all of the participants of WHAT we are doing and WHY. Yes, sometimes we have to get worked up in order to get things worked out. And all of this while Twitter users continue to post to the #SpeakLoudly hashtag.

I am well aware, as I have been in conversations with those directly involved in this discussion of her book, of what has been challenged and what has been under review. I am well aware of the challenges that Speak has faced in the past and will continue to face if we have more people who equate difficult literature as soft porn. And YA is not the only genre of literature that takes this kind of criticism. The classics endure their own share of scrutiny. I know the contributors to the SpeakLoudly campaign have had enough of the vocal imperialism that has attempted to steal our voices when it comes to the reader’s right to read. We welcome conversations about book titles, and I, for one, acknowledge that their are titles that are “next” kind of titles for younger readers as is the case in the current Hunger Games discussions taking place. But when others attempt to take the books that a highly qualified teacher has read through and has thoughtfully discerned the appropriate inclusion within the “now” texts, this is where we will take our turn to speak loudly.

“Jumped the Gun??” Excuse me, sir. Please spend 180 days in the American classroom as a teacher and you would see very quickly that is hard to jump something you are currently under. I wonder how many agents, publishers, and critics find themselves attempting to justify every decision they make to publish or not publish a prospective author. And I mean this respectfully; I am part of a number of forums that include some wonderful people within the publishing industry. Sometimes, I have to pinch myself and say, “Wow. How do I get to interact with these people?” But, I see those who can reject a query letter in one sentence, a liberty I do not share as the classroom teacher working with the neophyte writer. Each text that is selected for a classroom title has been carefully considered by me as the lead learner in Room 210 for the messages and themes our learning community can take away from the text. I am privileged to be in a position where I can interact with the masters of publishing while at the same time learning from the apprentices in our classroom who find their own voices while journeying with compelling characters. We don’t jump the gun in the classroom, but we are well aware of the scopes that frame the fishbowl within which we work.

“Swanning about??” Yes. I will swan about. I will not let some other person or persons sing my “swan song,” thank you. Today, my students created floor storms for the book for which the Speak Loudly campaign was founded. My co-learners found words and images and put them together in ways that made sense to them as they are just beginning to meet Malinda Sordino. My co-learners took great pride in what they had created in the first time they had utilized this reading strategy. What was created today will, no doubt, be the big take away for many of my co-learners this year.

I don’t rant and rave. My Speak Loudly voice can carry like a whisper from the front of our learning community and still reach that momentarily distracted learner in the back of the room. I try to limit the times that my voice goes to the level wherein I might be uncomfortable if I were listening outside of the fishbowl, but I cannot, in good conscience, let others limit what we are doing at Speak Loudly. I appreciate Teri Lesesne, who is much better at coming to the punch within the response while I want to make sure everyone has appropriate applied the Vaseline to their cheeks so that they don’t have to fully receive even a glancing blow.

For those who might see Speak Loudly as a “flash in the pan” kind of campaign that will quickly go away don’t know the difference between a fuss and a fuse. I used to fuss as a small child. I would get upon my back and scoot with my legs like an up-ended caterpillar. Once I did this in my grandmother’s gravel driveway. I learned very quickly that a fuss is local, limited, and can be lethal.  Let me introduce you to the fuse. It begins as a glowing ember. That spark is moving. That spark is is going somewhere.

Thank you for giving me a chance to Speak Loudly. Thank you to each and every person who has posted in the last two weeks to the Speak Loudly hashtag and to those who have visited the Speak Loudly site. Thanks, perhaps most of all, to those who recognize that we speak loudly for intellectual freedom and the child’s right to read. We hope this is something that most could get behind. For the long run.

To see where the fuse leads. . .